18 March 2024

Museum Monday 2024/12

 


detail of Laocoön by El Greco, his only surviving painting of a mythological subject, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

15 March 2024

Live from the Met: La Forza del Destino

La Forza del Destino is one of my favorites by Verdi (or maybe just one of my favorites), so I went out last Saturday for the Metropolitan Opera livecast. I had forgotten, perhaps out of self-preservation, the ads that precede the show, in which ridiculously earnest yet very, very posh voices assure us that the arts "inspire us" & bring "us" together (once again, who is we?), meanwhile touting luxury products (like Rolex watches) that I have no interest in, even if I could afford them. I object to considering art, no matter how costly or specialized, a luxury-lifestyle accessory, so I slouch in my seat, simmering with proletarian rage, while they hit their beats.

Forza used to be done more often & is now something of a rarity. When asked about this during one of the intermission features, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director of the Met & other places & our afternoon's conductor, first mentioned what he called the "convoluted" plot, followed by the need for a certain type of singer. I suspect it's more about the singers, though the plot is one of those that regularly get sneered at. As with Trovatore, ridiculing the plot misses the point, I think. It's meant to be convoluted & coincidental & far-fetched; how else are you going to illustrate the forza of destino? Again, as with Trovatore, a plot teetering on the edge of absurdity is meant to make the point that the universe is, in fact, absurd. The Forza personages frequently call on the mercy of God & His (Catholic) Mother, but ultimately (though only implicitly), these are shown to be fictions powerless against the pointless cruelty of existence.

This was a new production, by Mariusz Treliński with sets by Boris Kudlička. Paradoxically, I liked the production while finding moment after moment wrongheaded or, in my view, just wrong. The idea is that this is a contemporary fascistic military state (similar to Franco's Spain, perhaps) that devolves into internecine chaos after the leader, the Marquis of Calatrava, is killed. The overture has a dumb-show acted out throughout, & though it's nicely timed timed to the moods & suggestions of the music, it all seems . . . a bit unnecessary, perhaps? What are we learning here that we can't see in the first scene? Is it so difficult, even in our very visually oriented society, to sit & just listen to some instrumental music? We are at the swank hotel Calatrava, for a celebration of the Marquis's birthday. The agitated Leonora enters (or exits, as she is walking out of the party; the set keeps rotating, showing us interior & exterior). She is smoking a cigarette (such a trashy & banal directorial touch), which she stubs out – agitation! We see her lover, Don Alvaro, costumed like a rock-band roadie. They are preparing to run off. He has to hide as she gets pulled back into the party. Her father wants her. It's intimated that he wants her in more than one way. Most of this information, of course, is conveyed in the first scene – only the Marquis is portrayed as pretty much a creep; he drinks too much & is a lech & has a weird thing with his daughter: so why is she so reluctant to run away from him? If he isn't a kind & generous father, though one who is limited by his sense of social status & propriety, why should she hesitate to escape from his control?

Padre Guardiano is played by the same performer (Solomon Howard), &, weirdly, instead of a contrast with the Marquis, he seems to be the same type: when Leonora comes to his monastery seeking protection, he is strangely handsy with her, & she with him, in a way that seems implausible for an older man who is an austere but kind spiritual director & a completely distraught woman trying to escape the world. At one point I think he slaps her, though I actually doubted by eyes, given how bizarre & unnecessary that would be. At a few later points, when the Marquis is long dead, & we expect the Abbot, he shows up in his military Marquis outfit. It's a bit confusing, though the metaphorical intention is clear (perhaps all too clear). Another weirdness: Leonora arrives at the convent after a car crash, so her raincoat & face & hands are covered with blood. At no point does either of the priests she speaks to, first Fra Melitone & then Padre Guardino, offer her a towel or something so she can wipe off the blood. They just . . . carry on a long conversation. With a woman covered in blood. Really?

And when Guardiano agrees that she can take the place of the hermit, & he summons the friars to let them know, she is, again weirdly, visible to them – not even a veil covers her face. Isn't it obvious they're not supposed to know who she is, or even that she's a she? Otherwise, why, at the end, would the wounded Alvaro think she was a priest who could give him the last rites? The friars also form two lines & strike her with switches as she passes through on her way to the hermitage. Why? What penance is this?

That scene is, of course, the famous invocation to La Vergine Degli Angeli, & the music, both hushed & soaring, pleading yet serene, carries an emotional power that overrides any questions about the staging. Musically, the performance is at a suitably high level. Lisa Davidsen as Leonora is strong yet touching. Her voice has what seemed to me a core of gleaming steel (personally, my touchstone for the role is the core of gleaming gold in Leontyne Price's interpretations). As Alvaro, Brian Jagde has power & pathos. (I thought he was more nuanced here than in some of the live performances I've head at San Francisco Opera). Igor Golovatenko, Leonora's vengeful brother Don Carlo, is so persuasive as a man in the grip of an obsessive vendetta that I was really surprised to hear this was his role debut. Judit Kutasi is a surprisingly elegant & fluid Preziosilla. That's one character who really benefits from the staging; instead of a stereotypical stage Roma, she is sort of a glam entertainer/hanger-on associated first with the Hotel Calatrava & then as sort of a USO performer for the troops. Like Mother Courage, she profits off of & sees through war, & ultimately is another of its victims.

The whole mixed-race plot, with Alvaro a descendant of Inca royalty & the Spaniards looking down on him as a half-breed, is pretty much abandoned here. No great loss, though it renders some lines (which were very generically translated in the subtitles) a bit incomprehensible. (It's unclear now why Alvaro, as Padre Rafael, should take offense at being told he looks like "a wild Indian".) A loss that is a bit more important is the underlying sense of very formal aristocratic honor (& entitlement), associated particularly with Spain. If the Marquis of Calatrava is staggering around stage in a semi-drunken state, leering at & fondling showgirls . . . well, you kind of lose that sense of punctilio & propriety that motivates the worldview, & therefore the behavior, of the Vargas family. When Don Carlo di Vargas (in disguise) realizes that his new blood brother in arms is the hated Don Alvaro (also in disguise), & takes care to help him recover from his wounds so that he can kill him in a fair fight, it is both noble & a bit absurd. But if you remove any sense of the manly honor that motivates him to behave this way, the action becomes wholly absurd.

Yet I found the production powerful. It seemed clear that the director, who is from Poland, had the brutal & barbaric invasion of Ukraine very much on his mind in trying to portray what war does to a nation & the people living there. He honors the seriousness of it (Preziosilla's rataplan, rataplan, war is glorious stuff is given with incisive irony). So despite what seemed to me missteps on a detailed level, the production as a whole is – I'll go with honorable. & of course the music, & the committed performers, carry us over any bumps in this long & twisty road.

San Francisco Performances: Jonathan Biss & Echoes of Schubert #2

Last night at Herbst Theater, Jonathan Biss returned for the second of his three-concert series for San Francisco Performances, each coupling an Impromptu & one of the final three piano sonatas by Schubert with a newly commissioned work for solo piano. The series is turning out to be a very rich experience.

The opening was the Impromptu in A-flat Major, #2, played with Biss's characteristic poetic attention & intensity. Biss writes his own program notes, which do exactly what program notes should do: make us aware of what the artists are doing in & with the music, & give us signposts to listen for. The program notes for the second piece, a newly commissioned work from Alvin Singleton titled Bed-Stuy Sonata, were spoken from the stage by the pianist. In accordance with the composer's reluctance to impose interpretation, Biss invited us to listen for ourselves; even the title, which is apparently unusually specific for Singleton – it is a nickname for the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the composer grew up – is not meant to trigger any sort of association, nostalgic, pictorial, or biographical; when asked by Biss about the title, Singleton replied that his titles were mostly meant for himself & not the performer or the audience.

It is a wonderful, striking piece, clearly virtuosic without empty flash. Solemn, pillar-like notes move forward in a stately procession, their sounds reverberating to the border of silence, to be followed by glittering, muscular but somehow tender, cascades of notes. This dense complexity alternates with the slower pillar-like moments (the piece is all in one movement). The sonata ends with a little uptick in the sound which seems like a question, left unanswered & dying away in the air. The whole thing is redolent of an urban setting, with tall buildings & tumult & grace notes of calm & near-silence. It could also, though, describe a purely interior landscape. Last night was only the second public performance of the piece. I know I keep saying of new music I wish they had played it twice, but, you know, somebody really needs to do that. For this piece Biss used a tablet with the music, which he could forward with a pedal, which audibly amazed the old woman with clanging "artistic" bracelets a few rows behind me.

After the intermission we had the Sonata in A Major D 959. Aside from the obvious beauty of the rolling & swirling currents of sound, I appreciate Biss's emphasis on the psychological & moral complexity of this music; framing it as Schubert's way of processing his impending & very early death, he emphasizes the struggle & the strangeness of what's going on; the silences are as telling as the sounds. The moments of near-breakdown emerge with clarity from the formal structures trying to contain & process them. As with the first concert in the series, the encore was another short piece by Schubert.

The audience was mostly well-behaved, though the first piece was disturbed by a person on the left who kept "whispering" loudly "I can't sit here!" Before the performance some people in that section had been complaining about a high-pitched hum or beep; I didn't hear it so I wasn't sure, but one of them kept saying that high-pitched sounds weren't audible to old people but he could hear it, so maybe there was something. I don't know why the other person couldn't just quietly move to an empty seat during the first piece instead of letting us all know he couldn't sit there. & I've mentioned the woman with clanging bracelets. I will self-righteously note that I was wearing several bracelets, only mine didn't clang, clash, or chime. At least this time there wasn't an idiot who brought his goddamn lapdog in, as happened at the Lawrence Brownlee concert.

The next & final concert in the series, which I am very much looking forward to, will be on 2 May. My write-up of the first concert is here.

Friday Photo 2024/11

 


a goose near the Gardner Museum, from my 2019 trip to Boston; I wonder if this bird is still alive

13 March 2024

Poem of the Week 2024/11

In the Darkness, Someone Is Playing Guitar

In the darkness, someone is playing guitar
singing of red roses
or swaying poppies in the countryside
or maybe some other nameless flower

A courtyard with pines, at first light
filled with fallen pinecones, sparrows hopping
a black umbrella and a hat
lying submerged at the bottom of the pond

Midnight snowflakes billow up from the bridge
rising above my head, into the starry sky
They look down on the town from on high
like El Greco

The countryside blooms with blood-red flowers
Someone is playing guitar in the dark
The pearl earrings you took off
roll around the tabletop

Bumping into each other, the pearls make
the faintest of sounds – it's the poppies
swaying open – it's someone
strumming a guitar again in the dark
    
                                                    May 19, 2015

– Wang Yin, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter

I don't know if Yin intended this, but this poem seems to me like a tribute to Lorca: the (apparently) Spanish setting, the beautiful but unsettling & somewhat surreal images, the intimations of love & death.

People are here, but at a remove: someone is playing a guitar,  but the person is unseen in the darkness, & perhaps their language is unknown to the poet: the roses & poppies, so vividly present in the first stanza, are merely guesses by the speaker as to what the song sounds like: red roses (associated with romantic love), beautifully swaying poppies (associated with drugs, dreams, & death), or, he admits, maybe some other nameless flower; the anonymous flower has its own mystery. Whatever the song, it brings these floral intimations, with their suggestions of a deeper world, manifested in these noises in the dark.

In the second stanza, we are suddenly in a courtyard with pines; again, there must be people who built & live in the courtyard, but they are not presented; the darkness is just beginning to recede, & we see fallen pinecones & little birds. The pine trees are present only in the form of their fallen seeds (the pinecones). Did someone plant these trees, or is this courtyard a rural retreat? A more direct intimation of human inhabitants comes in the third line, with a black umbrella & a hat, which we are told are submerged at the bottom of the pond. The effect is not startling; the phrasing is too calm for that, but it is unsettling. How long have these items been there? Long enough to be submerged. But how did they get there? Blown off in a storm, or intentionally abandoned? What happened to whoever carried the umbrella & wore the hat: did the person (we don't know the gender) die in the pond? Accidental death, or maybe suicide? You can't rule out murder; it's one of the darker implications underlying the gorgeous images of this poem.

Images & setting change again in the third stanza. Although the transition is abrupt, it doesn't seem so; there is an underlying harmony, a dream- & image-logic, to the very strong visuals here that unites disparate places & times. We are back to the darkness: it is midnight, & though it is snowing, the sky is clear enough for the speaker to see the stars are visible & shining. In another subtly unexpected divergence from normal nature, the snowflakes are whirling up rather than down. Is this related to the way winds play around the bridge? Why is the speaker under a bridge at midnight? 
Is the bridge related to the pond, with its hidden umbrella & hat? We receive another intimation of mortality in the mention of El Greco: his elongated Mannerist saints & angels give a celestial touch to the scene, but there is no direct mention of Heaven or God; instead, we have the divine represented by an artist, with an aesthetic & comprehensive gaze on whatever is happening on earth. (& who is the they looking down like El Greco? the stars, the ascending snowflakes?)

In the fourth stanza, the flowers return. This time, they unite the sensuous roses & the death-tinged poppies; the flowers are blood-red. We are back in the darkness, so is the speaker just projecting this color, this union of life & death, onto the flowers? Or are these blooms, like the ones in the first stanza, not in the ground but the air, summoned by the singer's art into the speaker's listening imagination? As with the second stanza, we have a person appearing indirectly, in the form of items she was wearing & has removed: her pearl earrings. Why did she remove the earrings? Getting ready for bed, because it's night, & preparing to sleep, or to sleep with someone? The lovely iridescence of pearls is not mentioned, though the word carries the image into our minds; instead, the adornments are evoked by the sound they make (this is a poem of strongly visual images, many of which are actually present only as sounds or suggestions).

The final stanza flows directly from the preceding one; it is the only stanza in this poem that seems to relate directly to the one that precedes it, creating a sort of culminating image, one that is surprisingly vivid, given how delicate & distant it really is: the faint sound of pearls bumping together as they roll on a tabletop (why are they rolling? were they taken off in haste & tossed down, despite their value? if they were removed abruptly, then why?) This sound, barely there, ties together other image-strands of the poem: the sound of the pearls is also the sound of the poppies opening is also the sound of someone strumming a guitar in the dark – someone strumming a guitar again in the dark; this moment of beauty & apprehension is not unique, but one that is recreated over & over.

The images here are detached, in several ways: separated from each other, & a step or two removed from people. Some of them are only imaginary. Yet together they create a complex of strong images & feelings, vivid & beautiful yet also uncertain & unsettling.

I took this poem from the wonderfully titled collection A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts by Wang Yin, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, issued by New York Review Books.

08 March 2024

06 March 2024

Poem of the Week 2024/10

Pied Beauty

        Glory be to God for dappled things –
            For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
    Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
        And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
    Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
        With swift, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                                                Práise hím.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

When I first came across poems by Hopkins, I couldn't figure out what he was doing: what were these odd accent marks in seemingly random places, these strange compound-words, the varying lengths of the lines? What turned the key in the lock for me was reading that he was fascinated & greatly influenced by Old English poetry (an increasing interest in a specific place's ancient culture is one of the more creative aspects of the growing nationalism of Hopkins's time, the late nineteenth-century, though its shadow side was a destructive tribalism & insistence on "cultural purity" meant to exclude outsiders). Suddenly the compound words made sense, as did his insistence on the beat falling in certain apparently irregular places: all attempts to recreate in late Victorian England the freshness & vigor of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Hopkins called his accentuation system sprung rhythm; the first beat of a foot is accented but may be followed by a varying number of unaccented syllables (Hopkins held that this method was closer to spoken speech, as well as to ancient ballads & nursery rhymes). When there might be doubt about whether to emphasize a syllable, he added an acute accent (as in the line With swift, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím); the grave accents (frecklèd) tell you that a syllable is to be pronounced but not emphasized.

The substance of this poem is straightforward: it is a hymn of praise to God the Creator (Hopkins was a convert to the Roman Catholic Church & became a Jesuit priest). The delight is in the details. Theologically, it is held that only God is perfect (his perfection is here significantly called his beauty, a beauty that is unchanging), so it follows that his creation is inherently imperfect, & that is what Hopkins celebrates here: not the whole, perfect, & pure, but the dappled, stippled, freckled. Not only are things imperfect, they metamorphose into other things: the multi-colored sky is a spotted cow! the fallen chestnuts are the glowing coals falling in the fireplace! The scope of the speaker's observations runs from the deep pink spots on the swimming trout (spots that disappear when the trout dies, so the spots are not only beautiful, but a sign of life) to vast landscapes, split up & varied.

Humanity appears here only by implication: in the landscapes pieced out & worked over, both the farmed & the (temporarily) fallow; in the "trades" – the way people work in & shape the world – with their particular & diverse equipment & tools. There is an implication that in the celestial eyes of the creator, the trout & the chestnut are equal to the farm & the worker. The poem begins with very specific examples, usually from the natural world, moves to include implied humanity in that nature, & then, perhaps a bit perversely, ends up including in the celebration even things that seem stubbornly, even perversely, opposed to the orderly:

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
    Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)

You'd think a priest would be more prescriptive about the natural order of things, but the poet is suggesting that God's view is larger than ours: the answer to the parenthetical question who knows how? would be that God knows how, even if we do not (& the question could be read to suggest that we can't even know all the ways in which something may be freckled, as well as why & how it is so). In the line With swift, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím Hopkins is casting a very wide net; the contradictory pairs of words are an inclusive gathering of difference, all from the creative being of God, seen here in Catholic terms as God the Father (who fathers-forth this abundance). Our flawed states, even our brokenness & perversity, are part of the generosity of the creator. You don't have to accept Hopkins's view of God, or even believe in a god at all, to find in this celebration of the world's abundance a view of universal inclusive love.

I took this from the Oxford World's Classics edition of Selected Poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

04 March 2024

What I Watched: February 2024

Before January ended I started re-watching Disc 1 of Edison: The Invention of the Movies, a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art & the Library of Congress issued by Kino sometime in (I think) the early 2000s, but going through the disc took me into February; the films are short but there are quite a few of them. The first disc goes from 1889 to 1903. Sometimes people tell me they're watching "an old movie" & it turns out to be from 1964 or suchlike. I laugh! "An old movie" means pre-1915.

This is a wonderful collection. There's always a fascination in old movies in seeing not just a vanished world but a vanished way of looking at the world. The commentators on this set are very useful in this regard, pointing out, for example, that Edison had a keen eye for what would sell & tended to promote basically sex & violence (contrasted with the Lumière Brothers in France, who were more likely to show domestic family scenes, rather than belly-dancers, or factory workers rather than boxers). Sometimes you need the context pointed out to realize what's really going on: there's one film showing a Black woman washing a Black child. I assumed this was one of those "actualities", a scene from daily life. It turns out that it's actually a comedy film, as no matter how much she washes that baby . . . he's still going to be Black! Horrifying, yet revealing. This is not the only such film; there's another "comedy" short showing an "old maid" (played by a man in drag; it was his vaudeville specialty) having her picture taken, only she's so homely (hence her old-maid status!) that the camera cracks. Comedy gold, obviously. There's a current fad now for "honoring the ancestors" & whenever someone trots out that number I always think of things like these films.

Some of these films take on a different resonance for us, in our very different era: there's the famous film with the clinical-sounding title Dickson Experimental Sound Film, one of the first (possibly the first) attempt to synchronize sound with image. A man plays a tune on a violin while two other men slowly dance around him. We tend to see this as a homoerotic image, though it wasn't necessarily intended as or perceived as such in its own time. It is rather mesmerizing & dreamlike, either way, & of course you can put your own interpretation on what is essentially an unmediated image.

These films are very old & summon up a vanished time, but also can reverberate in surprisingly contemporary ways. There are quite a few shots of "serpentine dances" & Eugene Sandow, posing in skimpy briefs, ripples his muscles at us aesthetically; you can see surprisingly similar dance-based short films on Instagram & TikTok; & there's a minor industry on those platforms of young men acting as Fitness Influencers who are basically doing what Sandow did, & in the way he did it (he sold fitness instruction books the way our contemporaries sell on-line personal training).

There are a number of famous films on this disc, including The Great Train Robbery, but for me the somewhat disturbing highlight is one of the most memorable films I've ever seen, Electrocuting an Elephant from 1903. I first saw it decades ago, when I lived in Boston, in a program at the Museum of Fine Arts. I have no idea what the theme of the program was & I can't remember anything else that was on it. I'm not sure I realized this particular short was from Edison & my recollection is that it was played in ahistorical silence. But there was definitely a change in the atmosphere of the auditorium as the film unrolled in its misty shades of oneiric grays. An elephant, wearing some sort of harness, is walked over to a stand. After a moment, smoke starts to curl up from the bottom of her feet. Slowly, slowly, she lists to the left & then falls on her side. She twitches slightly. A man walks in front of her, between us & the camera; the closeness of his torso is unexpected in a film this early, & almost is like an iris-wipe of the screen.

It's all slow & silent & gray, like a nightmare image that you can't shake even in the brightest hours of your waking day. I was amazed to rediscover it when I first watched this set. It turns out Topsy was an elephant who had killed people: one (according to Wikipedia) was a drunken spectator who burnt her trunk with a lit cigar; according to the notes on the set, he was an employee of the circus who fed her a lit cigarette, & in either case I say he got what he deserved, but as is sadly the usual case, the poor animal had to suffer for the stupidity of people. It was filmed for commercial exploitation but is an unsettling piece of found poetry. Rest in power, Topsy.

Then I watched the Criterion DVD of King of Jazz from 1930. I bought it when I was transitioning from DVD to Blu-Ray, & I wish I had bought the Blu-Ray, but oh well. This is an early Technicolor film, using their two-strip method, so it is strong (very strong) on red & green & not so much on blue. The colors are used deliberately; the whole thing is very designed in a fascinating way. The titular king is Paul Whiteman, best remembered now for commissioning & premiering Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, but at the time a general leader in popular music, including his version of jazz. Sadly but typically, the Black contributions to jazz (which of course means most of jazz) are overlooked here. Nonetheless it's a very enjoyable film; the musical numbers are interspersed with little pre-Code comedy bits which, almost surprisingly, are still pretty snappy. This is a Criterion release so of course there are lots of fascinating ancillary materials. There were attempts to come up with a narrative, but the chubby bald Whiteman was too unlikely as a romantic lead (on film, at least; I make no judgments about how he would succeed in life) so we have just a series of numbers, a random succession of scenes which holds up better than most narratives would. There is an overriding "here's Paul Whiteman's scrapbook" idea which loosely, very loosely, links things together. There are early sound cartoons interpolated in (including offensive racial stereotypes of "African natives"). Revealing period limitations aside, quite an enjoyable film.

Next up was The Midnight Girl from 1925. Describing the plot, which is already slipping from my memory, would make it sound more fun than it actually was: rival singers, tempestuous divas, a philandering father (played by a goateed & alarmingly sexy Bela Lugosi) & a simp son both in love with the same woman, a refugee from the dread Bolsheviks who has to work as a nightclub singer. . . . I couldn't help thinking that a director other than Wildred Noy (whom I'd never heard of, apparently for good reason) might have made something more striking out of all this. (Where is Louis Feuillade when you need him?) It all gets tied up in an improbably happy ending, with marital love & fidelity established even among the unlikeliest pairs. How disappointing.

That was followed by Something for Everyone, the feature-film directorial debut of Hal Prince, starring Michael York & Angela Lansbury. I had been curious about this film for a long time, maybe only because I remembered the summary by (I assume) Pauline Kael back in the day, in the New Yorker movie listings: "Nothing much for anyone, really. . . ." It turns out I don't disagree. York plays an outsider who comes to a small town ruled socially by an impoverished aristocrat (Lansbury). He proceeds to insinuate himself into the household's graces, mostly through seduction & murder, & as with The Midnight Girl, that makes the film sound more fun than it actually is. It's all weirdly unfocused: except for Lansbury, the aristocrats are dead-minded & conventional (&, improbably, opposed to any Nazis still lingering in the countryside) but we also seem meant to admire them, or maybe just her. There is a nouveau-riche couple with a marriageable daughter who are screeching social-climbing horrors. Why caricature them like that unless you're siding with the so-called aristocracy, but why side with the aristocracy? What do I care if they get to move back into their traditional home, a fancy castle? It's called a black comedy, but it doesn't cut very deep, & doesn't seem very black or very comic. The film seems too pleased with its own sense of daring, though it's not really shocking at all. In fairness, it probably was more daring in 1970, when it was released, as there is a fairly sympathetic portrayal of an affair between York & the Countess's son. (York is also sleeping with a number of others, including the daughter of the nouveau riche couple, so, you know, complications ensue.) I was reminded vaguely of Pasolini's Teorema, also about a handsome stranger who seduces & upsets a household, but I saw that film so many years ago that I can't make a more specific comparison. Time to re-watch that, I  guess.

Next up was Robert Altman's A Wedding, one of my legacy Netflix films. Netflix told us just to keep whatever discs we had when they shut down their disc rental service. They also said they might send us up to 10 discs from our queue once the service ended; presumably they found other ways to get rid of their inventory, as I never received any additional discs. May I just say I was increasingly annoyed with them as the end approached? They made a decision based purely on greed (disc rental is still a viable business, just not as profitable as it once was; there was an implication that only clueless old people were still renting discs, but actually it was mostly movie fans who wanted a more diverse selection than streaming gives you). But they kept marketing "Hey, didn't we have some great times?" It's like someone breaking up with you who insists on getting together to talk about how great things used to be. And . . . you're breaking up with me, just go away!

Anyway. I had not seen Altman's film since its release in 1978. I think it suffered a bit at the time from comparisons to its great predecessor, Nashville. This movie also involves numerous story lines that weave in & out, but it's smaller in scope & implication than Nashville. Nonetheless it's a wonderful film, & I even managed to watch it all in one night. Lillian Gish makes one of her last film appearances, as a family matriarch who dies quietly upstairs while the family is at the church. She hovers beatifically over the film, or such was my recollection; it turns out, on a re-viewing, that her character is more ambiguous than I had remembered. She is a gracious old lady, but also, in her gentle way, sternly controlling & hypocritically attentive to outward proprieties; early on, she has an affectionate scene with one of the family's Black employees, in which she gently tells him that during the wedding reception he should remain distant with her daughter – the one whom, as she knows, he's having an affair with; she also let another daughter marry an Italian man on the condition that his family never come to the house. There are lots of storylines that are only hinted at, or given us by implication. Things are unexpected. There is a fiery car crash (which I had completely forgotten), but the victims are not who we thought they were. There is a scene in which a gay classmate is trying to sober up the groom by hauling him into the shower; it looks like a seduction, but it's not. And the gay classmate is wearing the standard baggy white boxer shorts, while the straight groom is wearing colored briefs of a type that were, at the time, not usual with straight men. The film is full of unexpected twists like that, even in the details. Carol Burnett has a major role as the mother of the bride, a woman in a dead-end marriage; she brings to it her Chaplinesque depth of pathos.

Next up was The Silent Enemy, a late (1930) silent film, filmed in Canada, telling a story of the Ojibwe people before Europeans arrived on this continent. The film, directed by HP Carver & produced by W Douglas Burden & William C Chanler, inspired by Merian Cooper's Chang, is clearly a labor of love, an attempt to tell a native story in an authentic & respectful way. The set carefully notes, though, that it is a product of its time & needs to be taken as such; the implication that the Indian nations are vanishing is one assumption that no longer holds. And though all the performers are indigenous peoples, they are not all of the Ojibwe nation (the distinguished-looking man who plays the Chief, who has a brief spoken prologue in an otherwise silent film, is Sioux), & the driving forces behind the camera are white. I had seen the film years ago, but I don't remember its being as beautiful to look at as it is in the Flicker Alley blu-ray, which is what I watched this time. Scene after scene is just gorgeous; you could print & frame many of the shots (the cinematography is by Marcel Le Picard). The scenes of animals in the wild are stunning. The story is fairly standard: there is an elderly Chief, with an attractive daughter, & there are two main rivals for both her affection & leadership in the community: a studly hunter & a nefarious medicine man (the villain in these tales is so often the medicine man, or the high priest, or some similar religious functionary). Winter is coming & the group must deal with imminent starvation (the "silent enemy" of the title). But you don't really watch this for the storyline; it's more about the native performers (rather than the characters they're playing), & for the stunning images. FlickerAlley, as usual, did a beautiful job with the set; there are two different musical scores, including a new one from the Monte Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, & a commentary track in the form of a recorded conversation between the great Kevin Brownlow & W Douglas Burden about the making of the film.

Now that Netflix has abandoned film lovers, I have turned to my local library as a source of movie rentals, & I ended the month watching Yellow Submarine, the 1968 animated feature starring the Beatles & some of their songs. I had seen it many, many years ago on TV. The animation is striking, with vivid use of color, & those colors are absolutely glowing. The look is very reminiscent of its time (the iconic year 1968, to be exact) but also manages to look still fresh rather than dated. The general attitude is also of the period, with a sort of optimism & cheer (All you need is love!) that can leave us, in our time, feeling either wistful or incredulous. The storyline is piffle, but it's not really about the story, which is mostly an excuse for striking visuals & the songs. I'm an odd age for the Beatles; I was too young to be a fan at the time, so I came to them in later, in bits & pieces (I would still say I am far from a maven of their music, though I like it). The film does a striking segment featuring my favorite song by them, Eleanor Rigby, which I've been singing to myself, & sometimes out loud, for days now. \Ah, look at all the lonely people. . . .

Museum Monday 2024/10

 


detail of Virgin & Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist by Sandro Botticelli, as seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in their 2017 exhibit Botticelli and the Search for the Divine